FTMaintenance Select

First off the crew there that does all the dirty work we want to thank you here at FLS. Ft Maintenance has helped me tremendously not only to get organized but has brought down time in our facility down 23 percent. Having separate user accounts for my engineers give them the access to quickly search a part number find the location and have the equipment back up and running. Having a program that is so user-friendly and has so many features that save you time as far as managing your parts or also managing your budget can be a huge help when it comes to the end of year periods. Once again thanks for a good year Fast Trak.

Each asset is looked after and traced as per manufacturer recommendations.

We purchased this product in October 2014 over 2 years ago. It takes a lot of preparing to make sure it is setup how you will use it. Otherwise, you will be doing a lot of changing. We did not implement it the first year we had it due to time constraints, however, we still paid the annual maintenance fee in 2015. The second time the annual fee came up we elected not to renew as we still were not using the program. Our maintenance plan expired October 17, 2016. End of January things slowed down a bit for us so we had an opportunity to start implementation. I e-mailed the sales department and asked if we could pickup the annual maintenance and support now for the same price. October 2016 they were quoting a renewal of $. The sales department responded to my e-mail but did not give me an answer they wanted to talk about it with me on the phone. They did not call me they called my maintenance guy direct and told him it would cost more rather than the $. Frustrating after not implementing for 2 years still paying the first year of maintenance letting it lapse for only 3 months and wanting to more than double it. Not very good customer service I would say.

Just a few issues:
- When I first generated reports I found the reports that shipped with FTMaintenance lackluster and limited. They were missing data fields that I needed to display for the sake of the company. I had to use Crystal Reports to create better reports particularly for the Demand Maintenance module. This took a lot of time but gave me the opportunity to learn SQL. The ability to make custom reports is my favorite feature of FTMaintenance.
- I found the inventory transaction module nearly impossible to use for correcting large amounts of inventory parts. Adding a feature for say the administrator to import a CSV file listing parts to update the inventory quantities would be a handy feature.
- Similarly, the purchase order, and especially the receiving modules, are difficult to use. Things like limiting the parts to those with the same vendor when creating a purchase order, tedious receiving (one part at a time), etc.
- Displaying and browsing the list of work orders in the Demand Maintenance module is very slow as compared to DM History. I presume that's because the program is constantly UPDATING and SELECTing in the database for each work order scrolled.
- I think a powerful feature would be to be able to create tasks, parts, vendors, etc. on the fly similar to how entries are created for DM/PM status, shift, requested by, etc. fields. Having a button to click that would open a small dialog would reduce the amount of flip-flopping between modules.
- There's several bugs I've discovered involving entering data into fields, particularly after entering the wrong thing. i.e. Entering the wrong equipment number during creation of a work order from the quicklist in DM will often limit the equipment available to select later. I have to either delete the work order (if the work order is new) or delete the wrong equipment and add the proper one from the equipment tab. There are minor annoying things in other modules that cause problems. I'll have to write the steps down later to reproduce the bugs.
- Tech support is very helpful and work hard to fix problems. I'm not sure if you've found someone to take over Mark's role but he seemed to be very knowledgeable about the inner workings of the software, especially with reports and the database structure.

Despite these minor issues, a great program overall that is a lot of use in our company to monitor equipment maintenance, especially with new safety systems we're in the process of implementing.

Would like to see a little more detail in the work order completion like adding notes to a particular instance. This might be possible and I just haven't figured it out yet. I don't have a lot of experience with it and the work request feature has not been set up yet so I'm sure there's more for me to learn and tailor to my use. We are a mid-size machine shop and run the on-premise version with 22 pieces of equipment being tracked. What really attracted me to this software is it's price point, the attitude of it's representatives, and the fact that it's not too top heavy allowing me to get it running and not sit for hours entering all kinds of data I'll probably never use. They don't try to charge you for all the little extra things like a larger CMMS solution will. The yearly support and updates fee is the best I found.